Linus Torvalds could have been richer than Elon Musk. He chose not to be.
In 2005 his team lost access to the tool they used to manage Linux code overnight. A developer had reverse-engineered it and the company behind it cut them off without warning.
Thousands of developers. No way to collaborate. No backup plan.
Torvalds did not panic. He sat down and built his own version control system from scratch.
In 10 days.
He called it Git. On day one it was already tracking its own source code. Within weeks it was managing the entire Linux project. By end of 2005 Git 1.0 was officially released.
Then he gave it away for free. Open source. No company. No patents. No monetization.
He handed the project off after a few months and went back to working on Linux like nothing happened.
Other people saw what he left on the table.
GitHub built on top of it. 100 million developers. Microsoft bought it in 2018 for $7.5 billion. GitLab went public in 2021 at nearly $12 billion. Today Git controls over 85% of the version control market.
Every app on your phone. Every website you visit. Built using Git.
Torvalds made $0 from any of it.
He built the most used developer tool in history because he was annoyed.
Then gave it away because he believed it should be free for everyone.
And he has never once said he regrets it.